Wisconsin Dells: From Sacred Gorge to Waterpark Capital
Near Baraboo, Wisconsin
The Wisconsin River cut the Dells over a very short period of time. In geological terms, almost instantaneously. About fifteen thousand years ago, an ice dam holding back the waters of Glacial Lake Wisconsin gave way. The resulting flood tore through soft Cambrian sandstone that had been laid down in a shallow sea five hundred million years earlier, carving deep, narrow gorges, stranded rock towers, and arching cathedral walls in what may have been just a few days. What took half a billion years to accumulate was sculpted in a weekend.
The Ho-Chunk Nation knew this place long before European contact. Their name for it, Nįįš hakiisųc, means roughly rocks close together. The gorges held deep spiritual significance, a landscape of power and ceremony. In eighteen thirty-two, federal removal policy began pushing the Ho-Chunk west of the Mississippi. They were moved again and again, to Iowa, to Minnesota, to South Dakota. Not until eighteen seventy-three, when the policy reversed, could Ho-Chunk people begin filing land claims in the region they had never truly left.
The town of Kilbourn City was platted in eighteen fifty-six by railroad promoter Byron Kilbourn, who was extending the La Crosse and Milwaukee Railroad through the area. The railroad bridge made the town; the gorges made it famous. An early entrepreneur named Leroy Gates started rowboat tours on the river in the eighteen sixties. Then came Henry Hamilton Bennett, a photographer who had lost partial use of his right hand in the Civil War and reinvented himself behind a camera lens. From his studio on Broadway, opened in eighteen sixty-five, Bennett hauled glass-plate equipment out to the bluffs and developed prints on site. His images of the Dells circulated nationally, bringing tourists by the trainload.
Bennett is also credited with one of the first action photographs in American history, a shot of a man leaping a gap between rocks, taken in eighteen eighty-six using a home-built stop-motion shutter.
The town renamed itself Wisconsin Dells in nineteen thirty-one to lean into the tourism identity. Then, in nineteen ninety-four, the first indoor waterpark in the United States opened here, and the Dells pivoted again. Today it hosts more waterpark capacity per square mile than anywhere else on earth, a transformation that would have startled Bennett, and probably astonished the Ho-Chunk.
